Pleasure Aesthetics

This essay develops a theory of Mika Rottenberg's video art by attending to both the content her work represents (neoliberalism's logic of gendered labor) and the formal characteristics by which her art affects (sensibly drawing the viewer in while resisting assimilation into conceptual critique). Rottenberg's art flirts with a logic of cognitive mapping by suggesting the structures of global production and gendered labor that characterize our neoliberal world order. Through editing and documentary-like international filming, her works suture seemingly disparate locations and activities within an international division of labor. At the same time, her art is neither didactic nor a means to gain abstract, maplike vision of the networked global production system. Rottenberg's art disorients the viewer through pleasurable, haptic, and nonsensical proximities that provide a felt sense of enmeshment within the viewing experience. Rottenberg's art recasts what we might understand not only as the political affectiveness of contemporary art but also the role of aesthetics within feminist practice and critique. This theory of political aesthetics privileges the value of sensible revitalization found in the encounter with art, while departing from established (left) expectations that art's most pressing political relevance is in its ability to raise consciousness or perform critique. This article builds this argument by moving in detail through three of Rottenberg's recent videos: NoNoseKnows (2015), Cosmic Generator (2017), and Spaghetti Blockchain (2019–24)

Aesthetics · Art · Pleasure · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Digital Media and Visual Art · Media, Gender, and Advertising · Psychology